from the would-rather-be-fast-than-be-correct dept

Infringement takedown notices: can't live with them, rights holders won't let your service live without them. YouTube once again is the flashpoint, with a Creative Commons-licensed film being taken down in response to a takedown notice. The Aaron Swartz documentary, "The Internet's Own Boy," was briefly knocked offline by a bogus copyright claim (that it was likely an error doesn't make it any less bogus) filed by Remove Your Media, LLC.

The Daily Dot contacted Remove Your Media, which refused to offer any insight on this bogus copyright claim.

A representative for Remove Your Media, Eric Greene, refused to name the client who hired him for the takedown, though he noted it was "a distributor outside the U.S."

Greene then deployed the most unfortunate excuse anyone can offer post-World War II.

"We were just following orders," Greene said.

Apparently, the documentary's foreign distributor confused CC-licensing with regular old copyright, if it even bothered to check on the film's US distribution rights before it issued the notice. (The Internet Archive's upload is one of the few places foreign viewers won't run into a "Sorry, but this content is not available in your country" message.)

A representative for one of the film's U.S. distributors attributed the takedown to "miscommunication," and expressed confidence it would be resolved soon.

On one hand, with a platform of YouTube's size, mistakes are inevitable. On the other hand, if the DMCA provided for a notice-and-notice system, minor debacles like this could be easily averted. Instead, it's a notice-and-takedown system that makes it all too easy to pull the trigger and let those at the other end deal with the damage. Companies attempting to protect their content are all too willing to move quickly, rather than move carefully, resulting in a lot of collateral damage -- sometimes including to their own assets.

Fortunately, this was fixed quickly, and even if it wasn't, several viewing options remain. But this is yet another indication that the ease of YouTube's takedown system is only making things progressively worse, rather than reaching some sort of balance between YouTube users and rights holders.

from the wish-aaron-could-see-this dept

A year ago, we wrote about filmmaker Brian Knappenberger's efforts to put together a documentary about Aaron Swartz. It wasn't going to be a "memorial," but rather an "investigative documentary" into Swartz's story and the lawsuit against him. Earlier this year, a very rough cut of the film made it to Sundance, where it received a tremendous reaction. In January, Knappenberger also put together some clips for a short trailer including some of Swartz's comments about the NSA, to help highlight "The Day We Fight Back." Now the film is finally getting close to an actual release, and a very powerful trailer has been released.

With so much going on in the world on a variety of issues that Aaron cared so deeply about, just this trailer should remind everyone how much the world has lost, and how much we're missing without Aaron around to help on these issues any more. Though, with that sadness, hopefully it also inspires more people to step up and help out -- whether it's copyright, corruption, surveillance, access to knowledge, net neutrality or anything else, the world needs the kind of help that Aaron provided for years. But now people have to figure out how to do it without him.